The many faces of class ceiling: Its manifestations at different career stages and ways to overcome it

• Main Author: LIM, Jia Hui
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2021
• Subjects: Socioeconomic status; class ceiling; labor market; newcomer adjustment; intervention; Organizational Behavior and Theory; Organization Development
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/etd_coll/342; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1351&context=etd_coll
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Even with comparable education and level of competence, workers with lower socioeconomic status (SES) origins are disadvantaged in terms of earnings and occupational attainment. This class gap, or the “class ceiling,” is as large as the gender gap, but poorly understood. In my dissertation, I designed a series of related projects to explain and potentially mitigate the class ceiling problem. Across three projects, I mainly focused on where the problem starts—labor market and newcomer adjustment in organizations. I find that, beyond discrimination and bias that has been the focus of past work, many challenges stem from workers’ own psychology and behaviors, which can be effectively addressed with a psychological intervention.